'Namesake' Is
A Richly Spiced
Immigrant Saga

An Endearing, Wry Tale
Of Indian Family in U.S.;
'300' Is a Gory Assault

By

Joe Morgenstern

Updated March 9, 2007 12:01 a.m. ET

Early in the course of "The Namesake," a young Indian woman, exquisite but disconsolate, stands alone in a spare American kitchen, pondering the riddle of breakfast. She has just come from tropical Calcutta to the ice and snow of New York City with a new husband she barely knows, an ambitious young man who has lived in New York and works in fiber optics. She knows nothing about anything in this city. Warily, she examines a box of Rice Krispies, pours a helping into a bowl, sprinkles it with curry powder and munches a first spoonful of the dry mixture without pleasure. This immensely pleasurable film is anything but dry. It's a saga of the immigrant experience that captures the snap, crackle and pop of American life, along with the pounding pulse, emotional reticence, volcanic colors and cherished rituals of Indian culture.

ENLARGE

"The Namesake" was directed by Mira Nair from a screenplay that Sooni Taraporevala adapted from the debut novel of the same name by Jhumpa Lahiri. In her previous film, "Monsoon Wedding," Ms. Nair evoked the drama of an extended family by bringing its far-flung members together for a ceremony in New Delhi. This time her story is centrifugal, at least at the start. After an arranged marriage, a pair of almost perfect strangers, Ashoke Ganguli and his bride Ashima, fly off to the United States, where they struggle to put down roots, succeed beyond their hopes and raise an almost thoroughly American son -- the namesake of the title -- with the singular moniker of Gogol Ganguli.

My experience with this family was a reminder of how affecting Mira Nair's work can be. The first time I saw her lovely new film was almost six months ago, at the Telluride Film Festival. Since I hadn't taken notes at that viewing, I saw it a second time a few weeks ago. Once again in the company of characters I'd cared deeply about, I caught myself feeling, irrationally but persistently, that I could predict the Gangulis' future, with all the anxiety and satisfaction that such a gift implies.

Ashima, the initially lonely bride, is played by the Indian film star Tabu, whose skill and tact are equal to her startling beauty, or vice versa. Ashima's future looks bleak at the time of her Rice Krispies repast. She has no way of knowing if the bookish, bespectacled man she has married will be cool to her, cruel to her or simply detached from her as he carves out a career in his adopted land. But that question is answered in a flash, in the sort of outwardly simple, effortlessly complex scene that Ms. Nair does so well.

Ashoke is, in fact, a man of extraordinary kindness and tenderness. He is played by the Hindi actor Irrfan Khan with a brilliance that's all the more astonishing for being self-contained. Your heart could melt when, at a much later point, Ashoke tells his son of the happiness that the boy's birth brought into his life: "Every day since then has been a gift, Gogol." And that's only one of several meltworthy scenes in the movie. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker this material might have been the stuff of soap opera. Here it feels improbably pristine.

The story of how a very Bengali couple's son came to be the namesake of a quintessentially Russian writer is the narrative that informs the family's life, in America and Calcutta alike. (The film, which was scored by Nitin Sawhney and photographed dazzlingly by Frederick Elmes, plays out in both places.) The role of Gogol is therefore crucial, and Kal Penn (of "Harold and Kumar" fame) fills it with a charming goofiness -- the teenage Gogol is a soul mate of Winona Ryder's droll depressive in "Beetlejuice" -- that eventually yields to endearing manhood. Gogol's adventures as the semi-self-invented Nick give "The Namesake" its generational sweep (Jacinda Barrett and Zuleikha Robinson play two of his girlfriends), and his rejection of his heritage constitutes half of the classic template of immigrant sagas. The other half -- reclaiming his heritage when he's wise enough to do so -- brings him to appreciate the parents he's been blessed with. On that score we've been way ahead of him.

'300'

ENLARGE

Gerard Butler plays a warrior wounded on the battlefield in "300," an adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel.

"300" presents a dual clash of civilizations. An action adventure that pits thousands of Persians against 300 brave Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae, it also pits millions of fans of brainless violence against a gallant band, or so I choose to think of us, who still expect movies to contain detectable traces of humanity. The oracles have already foretold which side will win this weekend's Battle of the Box Office.

Like "Sin City" before it, "300" was adapted from a graphic novel by Frank Miller, and uses digital techniques, as well as a palette of doomy-dreary tones, to fill the screen with striking images -- massed armies, huddled phalanxes, piled corpses, loathsome monsters, a tree of death. (The director was Zack Snyder, and the production designer was James Bissell.) The giant-screen IMAX version, to which I unwittingly subjected myself, ups the ante from striking to assaulting -- so many depictions of impalements, eviscerations, amputations and graphic beheadings that you don't know what to worry about the most, the body count or the head count. Being a Spartan, the movie tells us, was about pride, pecs and abs. Being a Persian was about leering, body piercing and, particularly in the case of the bass-boosted Xerxes, bejeweled preening; his costume would be a stunner on any runway in the modern world.

'Maxed Out'

"Maxed Out" tells us what we already know -- we're a nation of credit-card abusers -- in a way that lets us focus on the follies and misfortunes of others. James Scurlock's documentary serves up cautionary tales of epic abuse, though the overall tone is faux cheerful and sometimes genuinely entertaining, especially in the use of clips from an old educational film that looks too fatuous to be faux. The film within the film features an insufferably pompous authority figure named Mr. Money. "To earn credit," Mr. Money tells an earnest young couple, "first you have to develop your character; you have to be trustworthy." The trustworthiness of the film outside the film is variable. Its authority figures range from the articulate and persuasive Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren, who repeats charges she has made elsewhere that that the government and the credit-card industry are in cahoots, through unsubstantiated assertions of national credit bureaus with error rates of 90 percent, to the unquenchable, indeed unavoidable, Robin Leach, who informs us that "the rich are getting richer, and that ain't gonna stop."

* * *

DVD TIP: Immigration of the illegal kind provides the context for "Up and Down" (2005), a giddily intricate Czech comedy, with English subtitles, that was directed by Jan Hrejbek from a screenplay by Petr Jarchovsky. The story begins when two Czech coyotes -- of the alien-smuggling kind -- leave a load of Indian illegals at night by the side of a deserted road, then discover a baby in the back of their truck.

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